Plagues ancient and modern, or, The Black Death and the sweating sickness / by Joseph Frank Payne.

  • Joseph Frank Payne
Date:
1889
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Plagues ancient and modern, or, The Black Death and the sweating sickness / by Joseph Frank Payne. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    disease had disappeared or was disappearing from the greater part of Western Europe. Eastern Europe continued to be subject to epidemics for a much longer period, and in the extreme East, Constantinople suffered almost up to our own times. Looking at the broad facts of the prevalence of plague after the Black Death, we see then that there was a frequent recur- rence of epidemics for about 300 years. At the end of that time, or in the middle of the seventeenth century, there was a general decline, and after that there was an unmistakable eastward recession, to which law there were only occasional exceptions, which might be compared to the sudden sparks thrown out from a slowly dying fire. Thus Ireland, the westernmost country of Europe, saw its last occurrence of plague in 1651 or 1652. London, as is well known, has not known the plague since 1666. Germany was nearly free at the end of the seventeenth century, but had recurrent epidemics at the beginning of the eighteenth. From this time on the eastward recession is so marked that the limits of successive epidemics may be denoted by the degree of east longitude to yvhich they extended. Thus, in the first decade of the eight- eenth century an epidemic is recorded which advanced through Germany and Scandiuavia, but did not pass the tenth degree of east longitude. In forty years then, dating from the plague of London, there had been a recession of ten degrees of longitude. The next westward invasion, in 1719, was stopped at about twenty degrees east longitude in Poland. On several subsequent occasions in the eighteenth century the limit line passed through Galicia at about twenty-five degrees east longitude. Russia, the Danubian Countries, and Turkey, continued to sufEer, but at length in 1841 even Constantinople (twenty-nine degrees east longitude) saw the last of plague, and in 1845 it occurred for the last time in Egypt. To this law of eastward limitation there have been only two great exceptions, and one or two of trifling moment, viz. the great epidemic of plague in the South of France in 1720, and that in Sicily in 1743, while once in this century the disease found a temporary lodgment in Italy at Noja. But in all these cases the disease might reasonably be regarded as having been brought direct
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